telepresence

Cool video

2009-11-13T15:16:27Z

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer as a couple.

2009-11-12T17:31:52Z

I can't figure out which one I'm more jealous of.

Casting News for About 4 People on my Flist

2009-11-10T16:09:19Z

Pam Grier has been cast as Amanda Waller on Smallville. That's kind of awesome.

Contrast

2009-11-07T16:16:05Z

Beautiful

Ugly

Google Wave Invites

2009-10-29T16:12:30Z

If anyone on my flist wants one I got some more yesterday.

Geocities, RIP, and WTF Billy Ray

2009-10-26T17:41:45Z

1. XKCD does a tribute of sorts to Geocities. Not so much the comic itself but the page.

2. Billy Ray Cyrus or whoever is the primary guardian of Noah Cyrus: WTF ARE YOU THINKING, OH, YOU AREN'T, JESUS GOD.

Do the Mario! RIP

2009-10-16T16:56:40Z

I didn't mention it when it happened acouple days ago, but Capt. Lou Albano died. 76 years old. Wrestler, wrestling manager, music video dad, kids show host, he had an interesting life and was by all accounts a good guy.

Oh Daddy Dear You Know You're Still #1

Just To Fend Off Some Potential Headaches.

2009-10-09T14:12:00Z

1. For the Nobel Committee, nukes are a very big deal. Remember, this is a prize instituted as the last will and testament of an arms and explosives manufacturer who didn't want to be remembered as a death monger. Obama's work with the UN and Russia on nuclear arms reduction alone would have been enough to make him a contender some years.

2. One can easily point out the ways in which the Obama administration has fallen short of progressive ideals when it comes to foreign and security policy, however in general there has been an embrace of international co-operation and sane diplomacy that hasn't been seen in years. To some degree this does function as a bit of a farewell "fuck you" to the Bush administration, but I think it's also a practical acknowledgement that moving away from the "We are the world's hammer and you are all nails." model for American diplomacy does have a legitimately stabilizing effect.

3. The inclination of the Committee to be activist or aspirational has waxed and waned over the years, but it blatantly ignores history to ignore that at various times they've awarded the prize explicitly to encourage further action in progress in individuals or organizations or on behalf of certain causes. One does not necessarily have to have finished or "accomplished" various goals in order to qualify. Lech Walesa, Al Gore, and Gorbachev are all relatively recent examples of this.

By its nature the Peace Prize is the most politicized and "squishy" of the Nobel Prizes, very few choices won't be controversial to someone. But while Obama may have been a surprising choice or a daring choice, he's hardly, historically speaking, an unworthy or inexplicable choice.

Sexy 1900s Steel Conglomerate Tycoon

2009-10-08T20:38:48Z

Um...no. No no no.

Is it just me?

2009-10-03T16:23:36Z

Has LJ been incredibly flaky the pat 24 hours or so? I know they just did some kind of upgrade, but what's been happening to me is I'll click on my friends list, or a friends of friendslist, and get some manner of page not found. Then I click back and click again and it'll work.

As Bill Hicks said "Scuse me, scuse me..."

2009-09-29T23:35:30Z

You know, it takes a special kind of balls for Woody Allen of all people to sign the petition to have Polanski released. Hey, let's get Gary Glitter's opinion on the case!

Update

2009-09-15T14:50:10Z

1. Living alone continues to be okay. I have not danced around the apartment naked yet. I did take a shower with the bathroom door open. Wild, I know!

2. I wound up liking the new fantasy MMO Aion a lot, in the open beta period I played. It doesn't really break any new ground, but it's decently polished, fairly well tuned for the Western market (it's a Korean game but doesn't play in the super grindy Korean style) and very pretty (the main barrier between me and WoW is I can't stand the art style). Here's the login screen.

See that floating city off in the upper left corner? You get to go there. It's pretty.

They've also added western faces and done little tweaks like making WASD the default movement style, as opposed to click-to-move, which is typical in a lot of Korean MMOs. It's by some of the same people who did Lineage 2, but there's way more character customization and way less disturbing Drow Elf cleavage. Plus you get angel wings. If anyone on my flist is interested in playing they should let me know, because if I have a friend to play with I might go ahead and buy it.

3. Kanye West, host your own damn awards show with awards voted on by you, if you want to control who wins what. Otherwise have a coke and a smile and shut up.

4. Other than the passing game and a general opportunistic smartness (which matters quite a bit), the Patriots look really ordinary right now.

5. Roller Derby movie "Whip It" with Ellen Page and Zoe Bell? Plus the comedy stylings of Kristin Wiig and Alia Shawkat? Directed by Drew Barrymore, who is also playing "Smashley Simpson" and doing promo pics like this?

Well played Ms. Barrymore. Well played.

6. Glee is overrated (or overhyped). They're just never going to quite achieve that (admittedly pretty great) "Don't Stop Believin'" moment again. A concept that should have been a great fun movie, not a TV series. Mark my words!

Papi!

2009-08-27T02:23:58Z

Woo!

Allll By My Sellll-lllfff, I Wanna Be, All By My-Sellllllfffff

2009-08-24T15:32:43Z

That actual line is "Don't wanna be, all by myself", but that's not really true, so heck with it.

My roommate moved out Sunday. The apartment is mostly empty. The acoustics are weird, walking around in it.

My feelings are mixed. On the one hand, she was a decent roommate. She had quirks, but they were tolerable, and she tolerated my quirks. On the other hand, I'm 36, and I've never lived alone. Maybe it's time to try it. Her cat was sweet, but it also shed like crazy, and I will not miss that hair getting everywhere.

The plan is to spend the next couple weeks nailing down the final bits of the transition from shared bills to me taking over everything, I may wind up mailing her a final check, she may wind up mailing me one, it depends on how all the bill pay periods are dated when they come in the this month.

Then I start looking for a new apartment, because I cannot actually afford this one alone. My landlord is very nicely letting me stay here just on my half of the rent for a month or two, but eventually I'll either have to move or bring in another roommate and live here another year.

Mostly I fear I won't be able to scrape together the moving expenses. We'll see.

But for right now, I'm alone in my echoey apartment. It's kind of cool, kind of weird.

Forget It Wikus, it's Slagtown.

2009-08-19T19:44:14Z

Last night I watched a movie. A giant disabled spaceship comes to earth containing a huge number of alien refugees who can't go home.

These aliens have a difficult time living with humans in harmony. They're given insulting, racist nicknames, they're segregated into dangerous ghettos, they can be violent when provoked (and humans provoke them routinely), they have what we consider to be disgusting eating habits, and they are routinely exploited by humans who think they can capitalize on the aliens biology and technology.

One human, who starts off almost entirely unsympathetic to the aliens, is forced to form an unlikely partnership with one of them, in order to further his own agenda, but inevitably by the end of the movie learns a little something about what it means to be a person, regardless of species.

Unfortunately, a lot of the interesting sociological questions the premise of the film might have explored about assimilation and racism and class and anxiety about immigrants get swept away, as the last third of the film or so is pretty much straight action movie Fighty Mcfight stuff. Overall, good ideas in the premise, solidly enough executed I guess, but lacking any real depth and missing an opportunity to be great.

Of course, the movie I watched last night on Netflix was Alien Nation, the 1988 movie starring James Caan and Mandy Patinkin. But about the same thing could be said of District 9. It's not a bad movie, but it takes on some pretty heavy ideas and doesn't run with them, whether out of timidity or disinterest or lack of ability I do not know. Not as great as all the hype would lead you to believe, unfortunately, though the Fighty McFight at the end will be pretty sweet for sci-fi videogame nerds.

Yes. A Clunker.

2009-08-14T23:37:03Z

There's been a story going around the net recently, about a man turning his low mileage Maserati Biturbo in on the "cash for clunkers" program, and about how terrible it is that such a wonderful and exotic car is being sold off for a few thousand dollars.

Okay, let's make something clear here: The Maserati Biturbo was a terrrrible car.

By Maserati standards it was ugly, it was only a middling performer compared to the competition at the time, and it may be one of the most mechanically unreliable cars in the history of automobiles. The guy who turned it in tried to sell it at below market value and got no sellers, and that market value is only a few thousand more than the clunker rebate anyway.

If the guy had junked a Maserati Ghibli, or a Maserati Bora, or a lovely old Mistral, I'd be more sad/upset. But a Biturbo? Meh. Weep not.

telepresence @ 2009-08-11T08:45:00

2009-08-11T14:19:23Z

1. Someone on a board I belong to said something I liked, regarding the big flaw in the way mainstream news covers partisan policy debates nowadays: "Reality is not the average of all the opposing positions."

2. I bought a vacuum cleaner from vampyrusgirl and editswlonghair , one of those jobbies that sprays cleaning fluid on to the floor then sucks it back up again. But it was several days before I could use it, due to back unhappiness. When I finally did, I wasn't terribly impressed at first. "Oh, enh, it doesn't really seem to be doing all that much." But then I emptied the wet catch tank and was horrified by what it had picked up. There are things humankind was not meant to know, and apparently I've been walking barefoot on it for months.

3. This bakery/cafe I go by on the way to work needs to make their banana brioche bread pudding more often.

      Because they only make it a few times a week, often just the weekends, when I'm not commuting past them already.
      Also a morning and an afternoon batch, because they always run out by the afternoon if I didn't get there in the      morning..
      And they need a delivery service so I can get it sent right to my mouth wherever I am in the city.
      If my veins had taste buds I would run an IV of this stuff.
      It is very yummy, is what I'm getting at here.

4. I may have called for this before, but really: There needs to be a moratorium on guest raps by Kanye West and especially Young Jeezy in songs. It's like Ja Rule all over again.

5. Defying Gravity could be a decent sci-fi show if it weren't being utterly throttled by the soap opera elements. And I'm not anti-soap opera, they're just really badly executed here. On the other hand, Karen LeBlanc. Yes please.

Various

2009-07-29T15:10:09Z

1. It was absurdly humid this morning. I was a drippy mess by the time I got to work. I passed a guy doing some kind of physically intense paint scraping work outside of a house and I desperately wished I had the power to give him the day off.

2. The electric tennis racket remains the greatest invention in human history.

3. I am really saddened by the lack of blurry, half obscured shakeycam trailer videos out of Comic Con this year. The enthusiasm of the crowds is always fun with those, and this year we've gotten almost nothing. .

4. I've been friended by some folks on Facebook in the past few days. I just want to warn you, I don't use Facebook for anything and don't go there, pretty much ever. I signed up to gain access to some information which had only been posted to a Facebook page at the time. I really should just delete the account.

5. This is an awesomely gross, gross clip of a cyst being drained. This is, if possible, an even grosser clip of a larger cyst or perhaps an infected pleural cavity, also draining an astonishing amount of material. Why was I looking at this stuff yesterday? Why am I linking it today? Sheer boredom/perversity. I blame a permissive society and video games. Don't come complaining to me if you click on those links!

6. Talulah Does the Hula: Try "Bad Boyfriend" in particular. http://www.myspace.com/talulahdoesthehula

Want.

2009-07-24T23:00:14Z

It took a frigging year, but here's that Tron 2 teaser trailer in various good quality options, including HD:

http://www.flynnlives.com/media/video/0xendgame.aspx

So glorious!

Help from the Hivemind

2009-07-24T18:53:51Z

I am trying to remember a science fiction book. It was from the 80s or the 70s I believe.

It featured a huge jungle, and a character who lived in that jungle, a sort of Tarzan-like figure. He had a companion/riding animal that I believe had 6 or 8 limbs. This huge jungle was kind of like an ocean, in that the character lived at one level of it (brachiating), and the creatures who lived there changed depending on what level you were on. Deeper was generally more dangerous, and the actual ground was mythologically dangerous and bad.

The main character used a dart gun made out of wood, and the projectile the dart gun used was some kind of thorn, and the propellant was some kind of highly pressurized berry, I think.

And they get chased by some multi-armed predator and that's about all i can remember. Giant jungle, native guy, dart gun, 6 armed animal companion.

ETA: I found it. Midworld, by Alan Dean Foster, 1975.

Comicon Stuff

2009-07-24T16:42:57Z

Tron 2 production art. Some pretty cool stuff.

Stargate Universe Trailer. It looks...
promising?

Torchwood: Children of Earth

2009-07-11T12:43:39Z

Apparently some corners of fandom are sad and appalled by how the 5 part Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries turned out. Too dark, too bleak, they *spoilered* and also *spoilered*.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here thinking "Finally, some Torchwood that isn't crap."

When the show was first announced it was marketed as Doctor Who universe stories for adults, which mostly seemed to mean Doctor Who universe stories with saltier language and much much more sexual innuendo, which is fine and all, but not quite what I was looking for. Captain Jack, who was a great recurring sidekick character, was not a great permanent lead. I found the rest of the cast mostly kind of homogeneous and bland. And most of the writing/plotting for the first season was incredibly awful. Do not get me started on Cyberwoman again, jesus. The Torchwood team was mostly just incompetent.

Then second season rolled around and it was better, even good from time to time, but overall it was still too...enh. It was all just very mediocre, and I felt myself drifting away from the show.

Finally this miniseries rolls around. Oh, it's not perfect, there are some pacing issues and they need to stop going to the "if you repeat stuff over and over it's inherently creepy" well, and the ending is yet another Russell T Davies "Everyone at home clap for Tinkerbell" type endings, but finally I felt like all the characters were putting in a nice focused effort to do something more than resolve their own relationship issues. The baddie was nice and creepy, there was just a nice heft to the proceedings, and several interesting characters were introduced who could form the core of a revitalized Torchwood.

And about *spoiler* getting *spoilered*? Enh. I never liked *spoiler* (god, it all goes back to Cyberwoman) and I was pretty damned over the hardcore *spoilerers* because I felt it had the effect of fucking up *spoiler*, which was always a fun aspect of the character, and *spoiler* was just a big *spoiler* to me with his *spoiler* whenever he *spoilered*. So I really don't care. *shrug*

In short, I liked Children of Earth a lot. I don't feel depressed or appalled or betrayed, I see plenty of perfectly viable ways the show can move forward if they want to, and I'll happily tune in to see it.

Absolutely Amazing.

2009-07-10T18:39:49Z

This is not a joke, sadly.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html

Not Isolated By Technology

2009-07-09T14:54:06Z

I saw this video over at Andrew Sullivan's blog yesterday. No CG or special effects, just a bunch of fans of the band, webcams and great editing and choreography and inventive use of props.
Just watching it makes me feel mildly happy.

And for good measure my all time favorite video for feeling happy. I posted this before, a while back, but it's still lovely.

S&M Sportsbar?

2009-07-06T15:29:34Z

The State, beloved 90s sketch comedy show on MTV by the people who later went on to do Wet Hot American Summer and Reno 911, among other things, finally came out on DVD. my_tallest snapped up a copy immediately, and yesterday he and I watched a few favorite old clips. Some people do not understand The State, they claim it is not so funny. That's okay, merely being totally wrong will not ruin the friendship!

The only downer is that, like many great shows mysteriously not available on DVD, this DVD set is missing much of the great music the show used at the time. That "Why Don't You Try Pants" sketch without Cannonball just isn't the same.

Good news, however, for..I dunno, someone on my f-list maybe? Apparently Daria is coming out on DVD next year. I didn't love Daria as much as the State, but I did like it, and I loved Jane, so maybe I'll netflix it when it becomes available.

And now, horrific nostalgia from my Philadelphia childhood. These guys were an institution. A beloved institution! Stop looking at me like that!